was not so different from the oral one after all. But others have objected that it was misguided to separate literacy from schooling, suggesting that cognitive changes came with the culture of literacy rather than with the mere fact of it. Also, the Vai script, a syllabary with more than two hundred characters, offered nothing like the cognitive efficiency that Have- lock ascribed to Greek. Reading Vai, Scribner and Cole admitted, was "a com- plex problem-solving process," usually performed slowly. Soon after this study, Ong synthe- sized existing research into a vivid pic- ture of the oral mind-set. Whereas liter- ates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writ- ing is to "think memorable thoughts," whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There's no such concept as plagiarism, and redun- dancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in "enthusias- tic description of physical violence." Since there's no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speak- ers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or si- lently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past's incon- sistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth. U pon reaching classical Greece, Wolf abandons history, because the Greeks' alphabet-reading brains proba- bly resembled ours, which can be readily put into scanners. Drawing on recent im- aging studies, she explains in detail how a modem chiläs brain wires itself for lit- eracy. The ground is laid in preschool, when parents read to a child, talk with her, and encourage awareness of sound elements like rhyme and alliteration, per- haps with "Mother Goosè' poems. Scans show that when a child first starts to read she has to use more of her brain than adults do. Broad regions light up in both hemispheres. As a child's neurons spe- cialize in recognizing letters and become more efficient, the regions activated be- come smaller. At some point, as a child progresses from decoding to fluent reading, the route of signals through her brain shifts. Instead of passing along a "dorsal routè' through occipital, temporal, and pari- etal regions in both hemispheres, read- ing starts to move along a faster and more efficient "ventral route," which is confined to the left hemisphere. With the gain in time and the freed-up brain- power, Wolf suggests, a fluent reader is able to integrate more of her own thoughts and feelings into her experi- ence. "The secret at the heart of read- ing,,, Wolf writes, is "the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before." Imaging stud- ies suggest that in many cases of dyslexia the right hemisphere never disengages, and reading remains effortful. In a recent book claiming that tele- vision and video games were "mak- ing our minds sharper," the j ournal- ist Steven Johnson argued that since we value reading for "exercising the mind," we should value electronic media for offering a superior "cognitive workout." But, if Wolf's evidence is right, John- son's metaphor of exercise is misguided. When reading goes well, Wolf suggests, it feels effortless, like drifting down a river rather than rowing up it. It makes you smarter because it leaves more of your brain alone. Ruskin once com- pared reading to a conversation with the wise and noble, and Proust corrected him. It's much better than that, Proust wrote. To read is "to receive a commu- nication with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone, that is, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that ú o o o o o o o o o 138 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 24 & 31, 2007 o conversation dissipates immediately." W olfhas little to say about the general decline of reading, and she doesn't much speculate about the function of the brain under the influence of television and newer media. But there is research sug- gesting that secondary orality and literacy don't mix. In a study published this year, experimenters varied the way that people took in a PowerPoint presentation about the country of Mali. Those who were al- lowed to read silently were more likely to agree with the statement "The presenta- tion was interesting," and those who read along with an audiovisual commentary were more likely to agree with the state- ment "I did not learn anything from this presentation." The silent readers remem- bered more, too, a finding in line with a series of British studies in which people who read transcripts of television news- casts, political programs, advertisements, and science shows recalled more infor- mation than those who had watched the shows themselves. The antagonism between words and moving images seems to start early. In August, scientists at the University of Washington revealed that babies aged between eight and sixteen months know on average six to eight fewer words for every hour of baby DVDs and videos they watch daily. A 2005 study in Northern California found that a television in the bedroom lowered the standardized-test scores of third graders. And the conflict continues throughout a chiläs develop- ment. In 2001, after analyzing data on more than a million students around the world, the researcher Micha Razel found "little room for doubt" that television worsened performance in reading, sci- ence, and math. The relationship wasn't a straight line but "an inverted check mark": a small amount of television seemed to benefit children; more hurt. For nine-year-olds, the optimum was two hours a day; for seventeen-year-olds, half an hour. Razel guessed that the younger children were watching educa- tional shows, and, indeed, researchers have shown that a five-year-old boy who watches "Sesame Street" is likely to have higher grades even in high school. Razel noted, however, that fifty-five per cent of students were exceeding their optimal viewing time by three hours a day, thereby lowering their academic achievement by roughly one grade level.